Horizon Europe applicants slam Commissioner Zaharieva’s “lottery” plan

At a conference of the scientific community held recently in a large European city, applicants for Horizon Europe complained of unfair competition from candidates for EU funding who use AI to draft their application documents.

Horizon Europe is the European Union’s flagship €95.5 billion (2021–2027) research and innovation funding programme, designed to drive scientific excellence, breakthrough technologies, and solutions to global challenges such as climate change, health, digital transformation, and strategic autonomy, while strengthening the European Research Area through grants, partnerships, and missions. The programme is under the watch of Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation.

Applications for Horizon Europe funding are typically submitted by collaborative consortia of at least three independent organizations from different EU or associated countries, often led by universities or academic institutions to ensure scientific excellence and innovation focus, while the average grant size ranges from €2–5 million per project.

EUalive cannot reveal the exact place and date of the conference, because its hosts are also applicants for funding under Horizon Europe and they fear reprisal.

The massive use of generative AI has reportedly triggered an unprecedented surge in Horizon Europe applications: before AI, the sheer volume of paperwork deterred many potential applicants. Furthermore, proposals drafted by paid consultants using AI now routinely achieve near-perfect scores, as these tools excel at crafting exactly the kind of ambitious, Commission-pleasing language evaluators reward.

This puts at disadvantage applicants who fill the boxes in the traditional way. Normally a human-written application would not score as well – by far – as those filled with the help of AI.

Reportedly the evaluators contracted by the Commission also struggle with the larger number of applications and also use AI to give their verdict. As a result, a lot of applications receive a very high score, which makes it impossible to make an objective final decision.

In a direct attack to Zaharieva, resercher community representatives deplored her announced decision to award grants that obtain equally high scores under a lottery system.

Indeed, speaking on 16 September at a community debate on simplifying Horizon Europe, Zaharieva said that the idea had so far received only positive feedback, although the plans remain at an early stage. “We are exploring, not that we are going to do it in the next two years,” she said, as quoted by sciencebusiness.net.

Zaharieva believes lottery funding could help address frustration with the current system, where funding decisions often come down to marginal scoring differences, favouring the ability of consultants to polish proposals rather than real impact.

A Commission source told EUalive that the EU executive indeed is exploring “if and how partial randomisation could be piloted in Horizon Europe”.

“One option could be to use a lottery step to resolve excellent proposals with equal scores, alongside other variants that have been tested elsewhere”, the source said.

The push to streamline Horizon Europe’s administration is hardly new – proposals have long ranged from redesigned templates to a complete overhaul of the evaluation process. Yet today, the elephant in the room is unmistakably artificial intelligence and the Commission’s still-uncertain efforts to contain its disruptive impact.

Attendees at the conference were scathing. “Turning the world’s largest research programme into a raffle is an admission of defeat,” one senior professor said. “If the Commission cannot tell good science from AI-generated perfection, the solution is to fix evaluation, not throw dice.”

EUalive invited Zaharieva’s cabinet on Wednesday to comment on the criticism, but received no answer by the time of the publication.

Caption: Ekaterina Zaharieva on 28 May 2025 [Europe by Satellite]